It’s dinnertime, and Lupita has made breaded chicken, steamed vegetables, and pasta.
“We like to cut up banana in the pasta,” she says, putting one next to my plate. We’ve grown close enough to where I don’t try to hide the doubt on my face. “Hmmm…”
She chuckles. “No, really, it’s good. Estilo sinaloense,” she says, referring to her home state. “The kids and grandkids all do it now. If I make this pasta and we don’t have bananas, they complain.”
I’m still dubious, but for her benefit—and because I’ll try anything once—I carve off the end of the banana with my spoon and drop it into my pasta. I’ve had fried plantains before—though not here—but a plain old banana sitting on top of red-sauce noodles just looks wrong. The little star-shaped seeds in the middle of the slice seem to grin at me. A challenge.
I raise a bite to my mouth. She’s right—it is good, and I’m surprised. The sweetness of the banana butts up against the salt in the sauce at first, but then the flavors mesh, and it’s meaty but somehow fresh. I raise my eyebrows. “Alright,” I say.
Lupita nods. “Te dije.” Told ya.
She sits across from me at the table and takes out her blood pressure cuff. I’m used to this—Lupita has a little notebook where she records her vitals and glucose levels in the morning and evening every single day. She’s pretty healthy for 73, but I think it gives her the peace of mind, and it’s become a talking point, a place for us to land when we’ve spent the day apart. “All good,” she sighs, uncuffing her arm and jotting the numbers down on the page.
I nod, gulping down the last of my water. “Que bueno,” I say.
We’re quiet for a moment, and a gust of night wind blows through the open door, doing more in two seconds than the little fan in the corner of the room does in thirty. I’m not complaining though—the fan is a lifesaver during the day. But when the sun goes down, the wind comes out to play, if only a little, and I’m grateful that Lupita considers the front door to be more of a window than a blockade between the house and the outside world. Of course, when we go to bed, everything is shut and locked—we may live in the suburbs, but the world is still the world, says Lupita.
She fidgets with her notebook now, and I turn my face away from the echo of the momentary breeze. It’s been nine months, and I can tell when she’s about to tell me a story, or ask a question, or dismiss herself. Lupita’s a talker—a storyteller—so her hesitation now tells me that whatever she’s about to say is serious.
“Elections are coming,” she says, looking up at me through her glasses.
I nod. Billboards are everywhere, and whatever free wall there is in the city is painted with names in big, bold font—local, state, and national candidates alike. The first weekend of June is election weekend, and citizens across the country will vote for a new president, who will serve a six-year term and cannot be reelected. I know the names: the current president, López Obrador, is of the Morena party; Claudia Sheinbaum is his hopeful successor. Then there’s Xóchitl Gálvez, from PAN (Partido Accion Nacional). There’s also Jorge Máynez, but if the U.S. has a “third party” in the Libertarians, then Máynez is Mexico’s “third.” The race is between Claudia and Xóchitl, people say. I don’t know more than this, because when people talk politics, they mostly acknowledge their own alliance, or explain their disillusionment with the system as a whole. Everything I’m told is through the lens of the individual, and whether I have an excuse or not, I haven’t done my own homework to know what to think about each party’s platforms, or what the candidates are promising. What I am starkly aware of is this: Regardless of what happens the weekend of June 2 and 3 in Mexico, what happens the first Tuesday of November in the U.S. will leave its own mark on our southern neighbor. The average Mexican understands current U.S. policy—economic and sociopolitical—better than the average American, and there’s a reason for that: What happens in the U.S. reverberates around the world, and for reasons both geo- and sociopolitical, Mexico is in the blast zone.
But Mexico has its own vote coming, too, and amid the pollsters that walk the streets, the billboards that line the carreteras, and the conversations I overhear after church, it’s not hard to sense an air of tension. People are skeptical, hopeful, disillusioned, determined. In my own household, they pray for the coming leader; they repent over votes cast for past ones. Over pasta with bananas, they open my eyes to the reality.
Some things we can’t speak about, says Lupita, especially not in Sinaloa, she adds, where she and Job sometimes go to visit family, (but I cannot). Estilo sinaloense—the state that puts bananas on its pasta has other unexpected realities to deal with, too. Uppppupup, my sister-in-law says when the cousins bring up politics, not here we don’t. The walls can hear. It’s easier to be quiet and safe. One of my relatives’ sons disappeared, and now his mother is one of “las madres buscadoras”—the mothers that search.
(Lupita shakes her head. Realities can be awful.)
In the middle of Guadalajara is a glorieta—a roundabout. There’s a fountain in the center, and pasted over every inch high and low are photos and SE BUSCA, names and ages and dates last seen. Las madres buscadoras might have put them there, or other family members or friends. Some of the dates are recent—two months ago. Others are a decade past, the flyer faded and cracked, taped a thousand times because maybe, just maybe, so we have to leave it up. One hundred twenty thousand. And that’s just the number recorded.
It's better to be safe and quiet. A vote is a voice. But corruption reeks, and dead people will speak, skeletal hands somehow writing their names on ballots. Still, alive people will vote too—and we pray their voices ring louder.
I just hope that, whatever happens, it’s peaceful. Esther is coming from France in July.
Me too, Lupita. And I’ll pray for that.
And I want you to carry good memories back with you.
And it dawns on me then, in the midst of my salty pasta and sweet bananas, that this is a universal reality, just taking different shapes in different places in different lives. It’s real life—it’s messy, it’s good, it’s bad, it’s ugly, it’s beautiful, it’s complicated, sometimes fit for a newsletter, sometimes not, but if we’re being honest, shouldn’t it all be “fit”? We don’t get to choose reality, and ignorance is remiss. Real life can be awful and beautiful all at once.
It’s the fact that everyone told the chauffeur to stop the bus when it went over a speedbump too fast and an older woman threw out her back. It’s the fact that a younger gal—a stranger—got off with the woman to bring her to a medical center.
It’s the fact that moms and grandmas like Lupita wait up until ungodly hours for their grandsons to come home from work because you just never know.
It’s the fact that when the migrants say “Thanks for the food, Madre” after a meal, Sister Margarita says, “Thanks be to God,” every time.
It’s the fact that the other ladies who volunteer at the center talk about the homicide last weekend while we wipe tables after breakfast, and that the dead boy’s mom always says “good morning” when people pass her house.
It’s the fact that, when the priest wants to visit your host family all the way across the city, you just show up and your host mom, who grew up Catholic but is no longer, invites him inside and gives him a glass of water.
It’s the fact that avocadoes are so fresh and delicious, but then your host uncle casually tells you that the drug cartel controls the avocado market.
It’s the fact that the bread truck has a stupid little song that gets stuck in your head every day when it passes, but that your host mom will sprint outside to get you an oreja if you want one.
It’s the fact that migrants ride the Mexican cargo train to avoid “greater” dangers, and that they sometimes get injured or die trying to get on or off. (It’s also the fact that migrants take the “wrong route” and, “by God’s grace alone,” end up at El Refugio.)
It’s the fact that people would rather risk dying while trying to cross a country border instead of live in the circumstances of their current home, where there is gang violence and political persecution, or because, if they stay, someone might hurt their eight-year-old son just to get back at them. (It’s also the fact that organizations exist along the tracks and in the desert to provide food and water to people with intentions unknown, because even though the law has value, human lives are invaluable.)
And it’s personal too, this reality: It’s the fact that I have cried in Mexico and laughed in Mexico, I have been bored in Mexico and found daily joy in Mexico; it’s the fact that I have known deeper generosity than ever before and also seen the selfishness of humanity sucking at the marrow of the bones of the broken; it’s the fact that under the same sun and the same stars I have wondered the same things and found little to no answers, only the cooling night breeze that makes the day’s heat a bit more tolerable; it’s the fact that God is the same and will be when I go home, but I will not be. It’s the fact that this too is beautiful, and also harsh, and also real, and also okay. Sweet and salty.
Is this not accompaniment, to sit in all of it—not only with others, but also with myself, with the beautiful and hard realities and also the unrelenting human spirit that demands kindness in the midst of pain, that rides the train to God-knows-where-next but also says, “I am content; you are with me in this moment now, and oh, for that I am so grateful”?
Isn’t accompaniment this, to be served not only dinner, but also conversation, to treasure the opening of my host mother’s heart, which beats both hopeful and uncertain? Isn’t it to listen and to wonder, to pray and to eat, to recognize the ways in which nine months of presentness has allowed us to sit in a silence that is just as revealing as a conversation with words? Isn’t it to learn from Lupita, who declares that her grandkids are her patria—her country—who prays for her leaders and also for mine, who loves her home state and its cuisine and its beaches and also does not turn a blind eye to the dark side of the moon that rises over its mountains?
Is accompaniment not what she has done for me, the sacredness of her trust in me, in telling me about her blood sugar and using my coffee grounds to “feed” her plants, and who, over FaceTime, proudly shows my sister the mango honey that her brother sent as a gift? Is it not her cooking, and her joking at her husband’s expense, and her sitting up waiting for her grandson, and her asking to pray together, and her daily hugs and knowing looks because my heart too has been through a lot?
I am not who I was and I am not who I will be. But though there is much I do not understand, I know that it is good to eat bananas with pasta, and pray for political elections, and sit with my host mother in the palliative breeze of a Guadalajaran night.
~ S.B., May 17, 2024
Pasta with bananas, courtesy of cookpad.com (Puvvy Becky)
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